Elbow - "Jesus is a Rochdale Girl" and "Neat Little Rows"

I won't try to up my indie cred by pretending that I had heard of Elbow before they released The Seldom Keen Kid in 2008. I was a little too young to have done so but, like so many people, I feel in love with them. I went off ASAP and bought all of their albums and they are now, inarguably, one of my favourite bands.

Their forthcoming album Build a Rocket Boys! is one of the albums I'm most excited about for this year, and I've written a couple of posts over the past few months about the few things that they've revealed.

Well here, first of all is a live performance of their new song "Jesus is a Rochdale Girl" - apparently a highlight from the album, from the reviews I've read. It's as beautifully Elbow like as ever. The lyrics and vocals sound wise and sentimental, the rhythms soft and restrained, the broken piano parts punctuating gently every now and then with breath taking precision. Here it is:



Also, here's their lead single, "Neat Little Rows". It's Elbow at their anthemic best - thumping bass, a piano riff with the size and power of a whale riding a double decker bus through your bedroom wall and Guy Garvey belting it out as if his life depends on it. He has a stunning knack for combining his own words and common, every day turns of phrase - "neat little rows". The album's all about nostalgia for their youth and life at home, inspired by moving back into the parts of Manchester they grew up in. It bowls me over and make me grin to hear Guy asking for his bones to get laid down their "in cobblestones" or "in neat little rows", just like the houses back where he lives. One of the greatest living lyricists, without a doubt.



Also, click here to watch their appearance on this week's edition of The Culture Show. It runs from around the 18 minute mark to 24 minutes. Enjoy!

Scattered Black and Whites #1 - "Mr Bojangles" by Sammy Davis Jr

Hey readers. I've been toying for a while the idea of doing a series of posts with a common theme, all titled similarly and linked together. I've finally settled on "Scattered Black and Whites". This is going to be a series where I post about pieces of music and songs that are special to me. Ones that hold distinguished places in my memory. Ones that I associate really memorable experiences with. Some funny, other sad, others romantic, some totally strange and perhaps inexplicable. I'm not going to regularly schedule them, I'll just let them come as feels natural. I hope as well that I might prompt you to think of music that's special to you and why :)

I thought I'd start with my single favourite song of all time, a song I've loved since I was a little kid and that has stayed close to my heart even as I've discovered more and more music as I've gotten older. The song is Mr Bojangles by Sammy Davis Jr.



My favourite type of music has always, and I imagine will always be, Big Band music. The Rat Pack - Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Dean Martin and all the others who floated in and out of the group - are just, for me, one of the most amazing bunch of artists to cross the earth. I got introduced to them by my mum and my grandparents just as I was getting to an age where my mind was opening up to music and the part it could play in my life. It started when my mum bought Robbie Williams' Rat Pack covers album Swing When You're Winning. The mention of such a thing may immediately destroy any musical credibility you think I may have, but I don't apologise. It's a very, very good album of Big Band music. And hearing it made me want to hear the originals, so I did and at some point my parents bought me Sammy Davis Jr's greatest hits.

I spent a good portion of my early and pre-teens listening to nothing but Big Band and Jazz and somehow, through it all, "Mr Bojangles" stood out to me above everything else. I don't associate it with any particular experience, but I just fell in love with it. It might be the story. It's so beautifully heartbreaking. It's about washed up, alcoholic old dancer, Mr Bojangles, who looks back and his life and just sees all his wasted time and talent. It might seems strange that a 12 year old white kid fell in love with a song sung by a black guy from his grandparents' generation about a drunk old music hall dancer. Arguably, you have a point. But still.

This song just strikes a chord with me somewhere and I don't know where. I just love it so much. It has such a gentle, lilting pace to it. It strolls along sounding so wonderfully melancholy, all the tragic lyrics played against the smile you can hear in Sammy Davis' voice as he plays the part of the old reminiscent Bojangles. And he's said himself that he relates so strongly to the song, and that really comes through. The way he tells the story, he's just so into it. It might seem cheesy or corny to someone without any idea about the song or big band music, but to me it's just so honest. Maybe that's why it resonated with me at a young age. I think I saw that this guy was honest and real. And maybe that's what made me so particular about artists being honest and having integrity in my subsequent musical discoveries.

I don't know how you'll feel about the song. If Big Band and what not isn't your thing then it might just seem a bit alien and ridiculous. But I hope not. And even if it does, I don't care. This song is incredibly special to me. Heck, it's even my karaoke song. But more on that at another time perhaps.

The House of Love: One of the UK's Forgotten Greats

The first time I came across The House of Love was whilst reading music magazine Q. These guys are probably the only good thing I have ever got from reading that dreadful magazine, and they weren't even being reviewed or featured- they were mentioned briefly in passing in John Niven's column (the best thing in that magazine).

I got hold of a couple of their songs- "Christine" and "Beatles and the Stones" and just adored them. I immediately thought that they were simpply brilliant songs- fantastically written, great choruses and guitar parts. But more listens made me feel and see an aesthetic and quality about the band that I just loved. Something really individual and compelling.

Their heyday was 1988-1993 and their sound is really firmly grounded in late 80s British indie music, and they sound really pre-emptive of shoegaze and Britpop groups like Blur, Suede and Pulp. They came a little too late for the 80s indie scene and a little too early for Britpop and ended up overshadowed by grunge, so their lack of acclaim and publicity isn't inexplicable but is still tragic. They've got that wonderfully articulate, slightly wonky British-ness inherited from The Kinks which went on to be shared by Blur and a couple of other Britpop bands. These guys deserved so much more success and a much wider audience. They're not even one of these old UK indie bands who have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in recent years!

Most of the material I listen to from them is from their second album The House of Love, which is confusingly the same title as their first album. It's sometimes known as "The Butterfly Album". I bought it after buying a John Peel compilation which featured the song "Destroy the Heart". It's not on the album, but gave me a kick up the backside to buy it!

I really haven't looked back since I bought their second album, it really is a fantastically good. There's so much to love about it. The songwriting is brilliant- choruses can be massive, the lyrics are clever and really heartfelt. The vocal delivery from frontman Guy Chadwick is just so spot on-- it's got that kind of lazy but involved quality. The guitar parts can shimmer and twinkle as well as pound and thunder.

My favourite is undoubtedly "Beatles and The Stones". It's such a sentimental track, the chorus is just sublime and really wormed its way into my mind and I've been singing it under my breath for months. The lyrics are just fantastic, and I think Guy Chadwick does an amazing job as he takes two bands who are so engrained in history that they can become distant and lose their emotional resonance and connectivity, and blows that distance away and makes the impact those two bands had on him clearly and beautifully felt in one of my favourite lyrics of all time- "The Beatles and the Stones/ Sucked the marrow out of bones/ Put the V in Vietnam/ The Beatles and The Stones made it good to be alone/ To be alone".

Put simply, this is great guitar music and I think The House of Love are one of the most under appreciated bands of the past 25 years. If you like Blur, The La's, Pulp or Suede these guys should stir similar chords, and the same if you like other kinds of thoughtful indie guitar music. Videos below, I hope you enjoy and buy some of their brilliant music.

Born Free

This may shock you but I, Rhys Laverty, am about to write a blog praising a rap video for being violent.

MIA is best known for her alternative hip-hop hit "Paper Planes" in 2008, and the Diplo Street Remix featuring Bun B and Rich Boy. I thought it was a fantastic piece of hip-hop. However, I kept my distance from MIA. I was never quite sure of her, never quite willing to really fall in love with her, or understand why she was always rated as one of the most influential and innovative artists around.

Then, last week, "Born Free" was released.

Her latest single is a 9 minute piece of abrasive alternative rap which samples the song "Ghost Rider" by cult post-punk favourites Suicide. Eclectic and alternatively cultured as that may sound, the fuss about it comes from the video:

http://vimeo.com/11219730

It's a 9 minute short film. And it is incredibly graphic. It was dropped on us without warning and we realised suddenly that it was NSFW (Not Safe For Work). It shows a group of US soldiers violently rounding up a load of gingers, driving them out to the desert, shooting a child in the head, making the gingers run across a mine field, beating an escapee to death and ends with one of the gingers being incredibly and graphically blown to bloody smithereens.

It was removed from YouTube. It sent shockwaves and ripples throughout the indie music world. Why?

It's because it is genuinely shocking. It is genuinely unexpected. Genuinely unpredictable. And that is why I think it's brilliant. I don't think it's violence for violence's sake. It's not like Saw: The Musical. It's so hard in the indie music world to be to be shocking nowadays. All forms of media are utilised to supplement an artists music, every conceivable issue is being covered and the lines between genres are crumbling constantly.Innovation is everywhere, and that is awesome, but it's hard to be shocking and to make your innovation stand out against everyone else's. Also, I think its explicit and "excessive" (is it really?) content are a mockery and subversion of most rap videos nowadays- overtly sexual and gun toting but meaning absolutely nothing.

MIA has managed to do something totally attention grabbing. She's made a bold a clear statement about discrimination, oppression, US supremacy, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and countless other racial conflicts. Those issues are talked about so much nowadays, in the media and in music, that we grow numb to them. And yet, paradoxically, we really have no clue of the atrocities Western Nations, the ones presented as "the good guys" and guilty of. MIA has thrown those ideas back into the frame, through her art. Sonically, the song reflects the graphic nature of the issues presented, and I genuinely enjoy listening to it. The lyrics are simple yet brilliant too, a defiant protest about every person's inherent right to be free.

I've seen today that an anti-bullying charity has slammed MIA for promoting discrimination against gingers:

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Showbiz-News/MIA-Ginger-Genocide-Music-Video-Born-Free-Slammed-By-Bullying-Charity-Defended-By-Actor/Article/201005115623553?f=rss

But they are totally wrong. This video is showing us in a raw and graphic way that discrimination, violence and torture still exist in our world. On a grand scale- like the US invasion of Iraq- and on smallar scales- like bullying. Born Free, both video and song, is a brilliant piece of 21st century political protest art.

But perhaps you disagree. Watch the video and feed back to me.

Is it just violence for violence's sake? Is showing a twelve year old being shot in the head really an honest form of political protest?